WHERE DO CHARACTERS COME FROM?

I’m sometimes asked where my characters come from.

The honest answer is that I’m not always sure.

Sometimes a character begins with nothing more than a thought. A personality trait. A particular fear. A face I can picture clearly. Occasionally, they seem to arrive already knowing exactly who they are, and then, something interesting happens.

I just start writing them.

The more time I spend with a character, the more they begin to develop beyond whatever I originally imagined. They have their own reactions, their own ways of speaking, their own strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes, they even surprise me.

That may sound strange to someone who doesn’t write fiction. After all, I created them, but writers know that creating a character and completely controlling a character aren’t always the same thing.

Katie and Jay, the central characters in my It That Has No Name trilogy, certainly didn’t remain exactly as I first imagined them. Neither did the people and creatures who entered their story along the way.

Perhaps that’s one of the things I enjoy most about writing: discovering who these people are while I’m telling their stories.

A character may begin as an idea, but somewhere along the way, they can start to feel like a person.

And once that happens, you never quite know what they’re going to do next.

For readers who write: Do your characters ever surprise you? 

And for readers who don’t write, have you ever encountered a fictional character who felt so real that you found yourself thinking about them long after you finished the story?